The Lobster Kings (21 page)

“I can do it,” she said. She actually believed she could. She looked almost like a child sitting on the other side of Tucker. She was small, even next to Carly, but she had no doubt that she could handle the waves, no doubt that she could handle stuffing bait bags and sorting and gauging lobsters and the constant lift and pull and carry of working on a boat. And I don’t know why, but suddenly, even if it was just for a minute, I believed she could do it, too.

“Excellent. And now that you’re my sternman, my first order is for you to go into the kitchen and get some dessert.” We all laughed, but Daddy frowned. “I’m not joking. Go get some dessert, Stephanie.”

“Don’t do it, honey,” Carly said, putting her hand on Stephanie’s wrist. “You aren’t on the
Queen Jane
yet.” She had a big grin on her face, and I could tell that she felt that having Daddy take Stephanie on as his sternman was like passing a test. Maybe she didn’t get to work the water with him, but her girlfriend would. Now all Stephanie had to do was to be damn good at the job.

Daddy sighed and looked to me. “What I have to deal with from you girls.”

“I would have gotten you dessert,” I said.

“I’m sure you would have,” Daddy said. “That’s why you’re my favourite.”

The words curdled the smile on Carly’s face. It wasn’t a joke to her. I don’t think anybody else but me noticed, because Daddy had already turned to look at Tucker.

“Well, then, Tucker,” Daddy said, “I guess you’re probably wondering just what the hell we’ll be doing with a second sternman, but the short answer is, you’re fired.”

He winked when he said it, and his voice sounded warm enough that there wasn’t any real cause for concern, but that didn’t stop Rena from clicking her tongue and saying, “That’s not funny, Daddy.”

“Oh, simmer down, little hen,” Daddy said. “Tucker isn’t fired, but he’s done working on the
Queen Jane
. It’s been a long
time coming, Tucker, but we’ll have to move you to your own boat. Rena’s been badgering me and badgering me, and I suppose I’ve been putting it off because you’ve been such a good sternman. But you’ll make a fine captain, and with Stephanie coming on as a sternman, your job’s taken anyway. Besides, this way I can get Rena to stop harassing me.”

“I haven’t been—”

“Come on, Rena,” Daddy said. “You know how you do it. Stopping by the house with your, ‘Oh, I just happened to be baking brownies and I thought I’d bring some over and don’t you think Tucker would run a boat just fine?’ sort of questions.” Rena blushed, but she laughed with the rest of us, because it really was the way she got all of us to do things. “Anyway,” Daddy continued, “I’ve gotten tired of Rena asking, so I called around this morning, and I found a promising-looking boat for us to see in Saint John. She’s got some miles on the body, but she’s in good shape with a new engine and it’s coming from a fellow I trust at a fair price. If she checks out okay with you, I’ll buy it and you’ll run it the way you want to. She’s called the
McMolly
, so obviously you’ll have to give her a new name.” He offered up a smile. “I’m not letting my son-in-law fish a boat called the
McMolly
. As for everything else, well, I’ve already made a call about you getting your own licence, and that’s set, and I talked to John O’Connor, and Colin will be your sternman. Now that Colin’s past being a teenager, it’s getting too much for John to be working with his own son. Colin’s learned well and he seems to have gotten over needing to get drunk every night and sleeping with every tourist wearing a skirt. He’ll do well by you, and it will be a couple of years before he’ll be looking for his own boat. Who knows? Maybe by that point Stephanie will be ready for her own boat, too, and we’ll need to find a whole gaggle of new sternmen.”

Tucker sucked in his stomach and looked like he wanted to burst from his chair to give Daddy a hug, but all he said was, “Thanks, Woody.”

“You earned it,” Daddy said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing it.”

“Thanks, Daddy,” Rena said, and I saw her move her arm so that she could take Tucker’s hand under the table. I knew she’d give Daddy a hug later on.

“So, Cordelia, that leaves you,” Daddy said.

“Yeah?”

“Carly asks for a job on the water for her girlfriend, Rena asks for a boat for her husband, and you? You don’t ask me for anything? You’re playing a little too closely to your name, girl.” He grinned and then said, “Well, I guess if you ask for nothing, you get nothing. How about I buy you a beer the next time we’re at the Fish House?”

“Big spender,” I said, and I got up to clear the dishes from the table. It was the sort of thing that Rena normally took care of, but I needed to get out of the room. It had only been two weeks since Daddy had fainted, since Carly had told me she was moving back to Loosewood Island, but that was two weeks of Kenny being gone as well. I hadn’t seen him since the morning of the day I’d burned out Eddie Glouster: Kenny was gone, off the island, a ghost.

I hadn’t asked Daddy for anything, because I didn’t have anyone to ask for.

B
rumfitt Kings wrote near the end of his first journal that he saw a lobster the size of a horse. Not a big horse, but still. He compared the lobster to a horse. That’s a big fucking lobster.

This would have been when he was still the only man living year-round on Loosewood Island. When the fishing boats were there, he worked catching codfish and he worked on the shore as well, putting the fish out on flats for drying and making sure that the boats would return home with the cash crop of the sea. He fished whatever his captain told him to fish, and whatever boat he was on had the kind of hauls that the men could barely keep up with. Once the boats left, however, he went after lobster.

I’ve read that back in the old days prisoners were fed it so often that they petitioned to have lobster taken off the menu, but Brumfitt seemed to recognize early that lobsters meant something special to the Kings. He has dozens and dozens of drawings of lobsters in his journals. Minute, detailed sketches of mouths and antennae, of the lobster’s gills and swimmerets, of female lobsters with their undersides coated with eggs. When the boats were gone and he was left to his own devices, he ate a lobster almost
every day, walking down to the ocean and snagging one with his hands, that’s how thick they were around the island nearly three hundred years ago.

Lobsters figure in to some of his paintings, but mostly in the paintings that are light and airy, free of menace, and I sometimes used to wonder if it was the presence of lobsters themselves that made those paintings easier. Sort of like, for Brumfitt, a lobster meant everything was going to be okay, and in those other paintings, where there are no lobsters, that’s when things go all to hell. But there are a couple of exceptions to my little theory.

Lobster Pot and Fisherman’s Wife
, which is about what you’d expect, and
Tucking In
, which shows a couple of boys, about the age Scotty was when he died, eating a bunch of lobsters with gusto, are the prints you are mostly likely to see in a seafood restaurant. In those, the lobsters are obvious, but in the rest of the lighter paintings, even if it isn’t somewhere obvious, there’s a lobster hidden somewhere. The more menacing paintings, the paintings that cemented his reputation when he was “discovered,” rarely feature lobsters. I’m most interested in that weird group of paintings, however, that falls outside either of those other two groups, and with those fifty or so paintings, there’s no making sense of the presence of lobsters. Sometimes they serve as a sort of talisman, breaking the winds and the storms, and at other times they seem the destroyers of the deep, crusher claws grasping at fishermen’s arms, or swarms of them threatening to overtake the land.

If Brumfitt wrote his journals now, I’d read them as some sort of fiction, or maybe as the product of mental illness, but I think that when Brumfitt wrote that he saw a lobster as big as a horse—“one fit for a large child to ride, or to pull a small cart”—it was as real as anything else he painted or saw. I believe in Brumfitt’s stories and paintings the way that I believe in Daddy’s stories of Loosewood Island; Brumfitt was just trying to capture the sea and its power and how little control we have over it. He was just trying to capture the darkness.

If Brumfitt’s lobster was real, I’d be curious how big it would be now, if it could possibly have survived. Scientists have said that the older a lobster gets the less often it sheds its shell, but each time a lobster sheds its shell, it pumps itself up with seawater and grows a new shell that lets it get about fifteen percent longer and increase its body weight by fifteen percent. How big would that lobster be nearly three hundred years later?

T
he next week, on an off day, Daddy and Tucker went to Saint John to look at the
McMolly
. Evidently the boat was to Tucker’s liking, because he came home with it, and we had a small ceremony to rechristen it the
Twin Torpedo
.

Rena stood with me on the dock sipping from our tiny plastic glasses full of champagne. We watched Tucker—who was drinking fizzy apple juice with Guppy and Fatty—giving the twins a tour of the new boat. We couldn’t hear what he said, but Guppy gave him a big hug, and then Tucker lifted her up and put her on the captain’s chair.

“Huh,” I said. “If that was Daddy, Fatty would have been the first one of the kids sitting there.” I tried to drop my voice into an imitation of Daddy. “Here you go, son, you’re the future.”

“You’ll never let it go, will you?”

Rena put her hand on my back and gave it a gentle rub. I knew she was trying to be nice, but mostly it pissed me off, which was why I shot back, “I should let it go like you just let everything go? That it? The way you let things go with Tucker?”

She looked away from her kids and stared at me. She wasn’t trying to hide the fact that she was angry. “It’s been three years,
Cordelia, and things were different. Sometimes marriages go through a rough patch. I’ve forgiven Tucker. Even Daddy’s let it go. You can’t?”

I looked back at her and tried to keep my gaze steady. I felt shitty about it. I told myself to let it drop, but I couldn’t. “Daddy hasn’t let it go, Rena. He still doesn’t even know the whole deal with what happened with you and Tucker. Do you think Daddy would still be okay with Tucker if he knew that Tucker had cheated on you? What Daddy thinks is that Tucker was drinking too much and then quit and that you’ve patched things up. Daddy’s given Tucker a second chance, too. That’s not the same thing as letting it go.”

Rena and I just stared at each other, and I honestly didn’t know what to do. She’d always backed down before, always let me have my way. That was the way she worked. But there was some defiance there, and it made me wonder if maybe there were some things about my sister I didn’t quite understand. Thankfully, after what felt like hours but was just a few seconds, Fatty called to Rena from the deck of the boat. She looked away to wave at her son, and then she shrugged. “He hasn’t had a drink since we got back together. He was different when he was drunk. You know that.”

What I knew was that, at least at first, Tucker’s drinking hadn’t seemed like much of anything. When he and Rena had moved to the island, Kenny passed over to me as sternman and Tucker had taken on with Daddy. It worked out well. Kenny and me hit it off—both work and personal—and things seemed good with Daddy and Tucker on the
Queen Jane
. The first week or two, Tucker had busted ass for Daddy. Rena said that even with the work gloves he was coming home with his hands raw and blistered, but he kept at it, and by the end of that first season Daddy had gotten to telling anyone who would listen that Tucker was a first-rate sternman. It was funny to watch how Tucker had puffed out at that. I suppose I did the same thing when Daddy talked about how I’d turned into the kind of lobsterman he thought was
worthy of the name Kings. So Tucker took to having a few beers with us on Friday nights when we got together, had a few more when we celebrated at the end of the season, and it didn’t seem anything to think of.

Then, in the middle of Tucker’s second season, it seemed like Tucker was doing a little too well as Daddy’s sternman for my taste. Daddy didn’t go so far as to say he’d be handing things over to Tucker, but he started making comments about how it seemed like Tucker had been born to it, how even though I’d been out on a boat since I was a kid, Tucker more than held his own. There were even a couple of times when Daddy said that Tucker worked the water like he was a Kings. It brought back some of the bullshit from when I was a kid and Daddy couldn’t understand that I was suited for the water in a way that Scotty wasn’t. It was like Daddy saw Tucker and saw what he could have had if Scotty were still alive, but in seeing Tucker that way, it made me invisible. I probably should have talked with Daddy about it, but I didn’t. I sulked instead. I pulled into myself and my boat, spending my free time on the
Kings’ Ransom
or out with Kenny and with Timmy and Chip and Tony and the boys. I did my best to stay away from Daddy and Rena and Tucker. For a while I couldn’t look any of them in the eye. And maybe that’s why I didn’t realize at first that things had gone totally to shit in Rena and Tucker’s house.